4 Ways to Increase Seasonal Sales With Personalized Content on Social Media

How to use personalization technologies to drive more traffic and increase sales

Consumers are bombarded with marketing messages from retailers during holidays and seasonal occasions. They’re more selective about the brands they engage with and purchase from.

In fact, 63% of consumers are annoyed by repeated generic advertising messages. On the other hand, 79% of the companies that exceed their revenue goals use personalized marketing to reach their customers.

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Personalized marketing is the key to increasing conversion, and social media platforms offer a lot of opportunities for retailers to leverage the latest personalization technologies to boost revenue.

Here are 4 ways to use personalize content on social media:

 

1. Segment your audience

The foundation of any personalization strategy is to understand the preferences, behaviors, and habits of your target market. Social media marketing allows you to leverage customer data and segment your audience at a granular level so you can deliver timely and relevant messages.

In addition, your content should relate to the audiences’ customer lifecycle stages. During seasonal occasions, many consumers would actively research products and make purchasing decisions. Your posts should provide the relevant information to shoppers with a high purchase intent.

 

2. Focus on one-to-one interactions

Consumers want meaningful interactions with brands. Instead of constantly selling your products, focus on being helpful and relevant to build trust and relationships with your audience.

Monitor all your social media profiles to ensure that you’re answering inquiries or comments in a timely manner. In addition, engage your followers in meaningful conversations — for example, you can ask a question, take a poll, or tag your loyal customers for more personalized interactions.

 

3. Leverage the power of conversational selling with messaging apps

Messaging apps are popular among consumers, and brands are using these features (e.g., Facebook Messenger) to tap into the power of conversational marketing.

With the aid of AI technologies, it’s now possible to deliver highly personalized shopping experiences at scale via messaging apps. You can combine consumer data available on social media marketing platforms with your customer database to deliver meaningful interactions that’ll drive engagement and conversion.  

 

4. Use retargeting ads to reduce cart abandonment

Sales lost due to cart abandonment is a particularly acute challenge during the holiday season and merchants can recover some of these sales by using retargeting ads to re-engage shoppers on social media.    

For example, you can use Facebook dynamic ads to show the exact product a customer has viewed on your website. You can segment the target audience to deliver a highly personalized message or a special offer to increase your conversion rate.

 

Increase the effectiveness of personalized content with customer data

While social media platforms allow you to access a large amount of user data, you can augment the effectiveness of the content by layering on your own customer data to deliver the most relevant and timely information.

By using a robust customer data management platform that supports multi-channel campaigns, you can leverage your database to reach shoppers that are most likely to make a purchase.

Request a demo today to see how our unique personalization solution can help you increase seasonal sales on social media.

How To Design a Personalization Marketing Strategy For the Healthcare Industry

4 keys to increasing patient acquisition and retention with personalized content and offers.

Personalization has become one of the most effective marketing strategies for any business to improve customer acquisition and retention by increasing audience engagement and building relationships

It’s no different in the healthcare industry. In fact, with an overwhelming amount of health-related information available, it is now more important than ever to deliver content and services that are helpful and relevant to your patients.

Here are some essential steps to designing a personalization marketing strategy for your healthcare practice:

1. Create personas and map out the buyer’s journey

The first step to successful personalized marketing is understanding your audience by creating a series of buyer personas. 

These personas help you identify your patients’ priorities, the questions they have, the language they use, and their main concerns so you can design communications that speak to them. You can leverage this information for creating your content, designing your offers, and setting up your promotional strategies.

You also need to understand where your patients are in their decision-making process; for instance  they could be researching a medical condition, looking for a provider, or ready to schedule a visit. You can deliver the most relevant content and offer at the right time.

2.  Design targeted content and offers

When you have gained a clear understanding of your patients, identified where they get their information, and segmented your audience according to a variety of criteria, such as health conditions, you can then design targeted content and offers to deliver an individualized experience in the right place and at the right time.

Distribute the information and offers through multiple channels, such as personalized website content, emails, phone, printed materials, and social media, based on the patients’ preferences and past interactions with your content to maximize engagement and conversion.

3. Communicate the privacy policy

In a survey, 49% of consumers don’t mind businesses having a certain amount of their information so they can receive content and offers that are more relevant.

However, healthcare services involve more private and personal information than a typical retail business so there’s a fine line to tread when you use patient information to deliver personalized content.

To reinforce trust and patient relationships while distributing targeted content, you need to clearly communicate your privacy policy and how you utilize patient information before adding your patients’ information to your CRM system.

4. Analyze the data to understand user behaviors

There’s no one-size-fits-all personalization strategy and there’s only one way to find out what really works for your market and your practice, and that’s by analyzing the data to understand how your patients interact with your content and respond to your offers.

To effectively implement a marketing personalization strategy, collect patient information, and analyze the data to fine-tune your marketing communications, you need a robust customer data management system that provides you with a single customer view and offers content recommendations.

Request a demo to talk to our personalization expert and see how Nectarom can help you deliver a personalized patient experience.

GDPR For Marketers: How the New Law Affects Personalization

GDPR helps increase transparency and trust. Here’s what you need to know to stay compliant

For online marketers, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been creating quite a stir.

This new EU law, which will go into effect on May 25, 2018, is designed to give individuals more control over their personal data.

It affects how companies gather and utilize information from their website visitors, prospects, and customers.

In short, marketers aren’t allowed to collect, store, or use the personal data of any European Union (EU) citizen without an explicit consent.

The key areas covered by GDPR include breach notifications, right to access, right to be forgotten, data portability, privacy by design, and the appointment of a data protection officer.

GDPR In the age of personalization

What does GDPR mean for marketers who use a data-driven approach and personalization technologies in their marketing strategies?

Here are a few critical GDPR concepts you need to know when collecting information and obtaining consent:

Legitimate interest

You don’t need permission to obtain or use personal data when there’s legitimate interest behind the request for the information. For example:

  • When a visitor comes to your website and you need to present personalized offers so that you can market to them efficiently.
  • When a shopper is making a purchase and is expected to provide relevant information to complete the transaction.

Permission required for everything else

You can only collect data without explicit consent for the “main action” that visitors are expected to accomplish by providing their information. For anything else, you need permission.

For example, when a customer makes a purchase on your website, you don’t need consent to get the information required to complete the transaction. However, you do need permission if you want to add them to your email list or obtain additional information to personalize marketing messages in the future.

Individual rights

GDPR covers several individual rights, including the right to access, the right to object, and the right to erase.

Under the right to object, individuals can request a company to permanently stop all permission-based marketing and personalized communications. Under the right to erase, individuals can ask to have all their data deleted and be treated as a new user whenever they visit your site. This implies, that on their next visit, they will not see any personalized content.

Make GDPR work for you

GDPR helps increase transparency, which will ultimately help you cultivate more trust with consumers.

Most consumers appreciate personalized content and they’re willing to provide their information to the business that they trust.

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Becoming GDPR-compliant offers an opportunity to clean up your database and obtain the necessary re-permissions.

The process will help you better utilize the existing GDPR-compliant information to segment your audience, create highly targeted groups, and distribute personalized content.

Your liability increases as you collect more data. You should get clear on your personalization strategy and only ask for data that is necessary for effectively communicating with your customers and serving them better.

In addition, ensure that you’re storing the data in a secured centralized customer database so that you can manage the safety of your customer data while leveraging them effectively for your marketing initiatives.

Using Analytics to Choose Inventory for a New Season

Making purchasing decisions for a store or retail business is a complicated proposition. The decision-making becomes especially complex when you are trying to determine which products deserve permanent shelf space on your store floor; and which need to be discounted or sent back to the warehouse to make room for new inventory. It can also be difficult to know the answer to sourcing questions such as when to respond to trends, how much to purchase of a specific item and what price-points to sell at for maximum profitability. As a result, an increasing number of retailers are relying on predictive analytics to make more informed purchasing decisions. In fact, according to Martech Advisor, 57 percent of B2B marketers said predictive analytics was their “primary tool” for 2017.

Consider the following to learn more about how predictive analytics are helping companies to maximize sales and to make the most of their inventory budgets.

Determine Top-Performing Categories

Before a retailer can begin using predictive analytics to make better purchasing decisions, they have to determine the top-performing categories in their existing inventory. These can be found by collecting data on factors such including: sales numbers their POS system, consumer engagement with product images in specific categories and high-traffic areas on the company’s website. From here, a retailer can determine which categories are the most profitable, as well as what categories could be expanded to increase future sales.

Forecast Future Seasonal Inventory

Once a retailer knows where to expand their existing inventory, it is time to measure seasonal sales from past years against current industry trends to forecast seasonal sales. This helps determine how large of an order to place for a specific item, as well as where to take a well-calculated risk with a new trend or category. Targeted purchasing recommendations can be derived from this information, so retailers can order only what they need, when they need it – thus boosting seasonal sales and reducing the risk of end-of-the-season discounting.

 Adjust Strategy Where Necessary  

The capabilities of predictive analytics don’t stop once a retailer rolls out their new inventory. Analytics-based software monitors and reports on sales performance, so retailers can keep track of which seasonal inventory categories are the most successful and make modifications to their orders whenever necessary. This means that only the best-selling merchandise gets a place on the show floor. Since NectarOM uses the “Test and Learn” method, we are able to quickly respond to sales activity, so that clients can adapt their purchasing strategy in order to augment ROI.

Keeping Abreast of Trends 

It is essential for retailers to utilize predictive analytics when making seasonal purchasing decisions to remain competitive. In fact, Martech Advisor reports that 82 percent of B2B companies used predictive analytics in last year – and of the companies who did not, 67 percent intend to implement predictive analytics in 2018. It is not only important for retailers to have access to the consumer data, but also to have data-based forecasting software which enables them to quickly respond to industry trends and customer behavior. At NectarOM, we provide clients with software with real-time reporting capabilities that clearly outline actionable recommendations – so they can amplify seasonal sales and adjust to changing consumer preferences.

Here’s What to Expect from Marketing Personalization this Spring

There are plenty of buzz-words going around in tech right now, but the term that has the most practical implications for retailers in Spring 2018 is something much simpler than “voice search” or “virtual reality.” It is the ability to respond to data in real-time that’s more important to the marketing success of a company than any other sweeping technology trend being sold to retailers right now. For companies to have a high success rate with their marketing methods, they need the capability to quickly respond to industry trends and shifts in consumer sentiment. This allows businesses to send consumers marketing communications which can be quickly refined based on which social media platforms, preferred advertising channels and promotional messages appeal to that particular customer at a given moment.

Knowing When to Send a Message

The biggest factor in a company’s success with their personalization initiatives, then, is time. Consider this: AdAge reports that 80 percent of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience. It’s true that this refers to analytics compiled from long-term customer relationships that help brands know what marketing message to send to customers; but also – and perhaps more importantly – this refers to the analytics which help companies determine the best day and time to send marketing messages to a specific customer in order to incentivize them to make a purchase.

To better understand why you need to be able to send the right customer the right message at the right time, think about it like this: How much more likely are you to read, consider, or act on advertising messages from your favorite brands on payday, when all of your expendable income is just sitting there in the bank? Well… most customers are no different, which why this is just one example of how timing truly is everything when it comes to sending marketing messages with measurable ROI.

Following Up in the Right Way

Want to know how not to personalize your marketing efforts? Don’t send customers advertisements or promotions for an item they just bought. This happens in retail way more often than it should, and it stems from a company’s failure to fully integrate their back-of-house technologies to provide real-time data sharing across systems. When technologies aren’t fully integrated it results in an inability for a retailer’s POS system to communicate relevant information, such as the price point and SKU of purchased products, to their CRM system.

When there is this type of a disparity in information sharing between systems, there is nothing preventing a company’s software from making common marketing mistakes that can make customers feel undervalued, such as sending an email saying, “We haven’t seen you in a while,” when that customer just made an online purchase that day, or bombarding a customer’s iPhone with product images of an item they just bought.

An Opportunity for Fast-Action

A recent study by Accenture and Forrester found that customers are underwhelmed by the digital experiences being delivered by most brands. In fact, only 7 percent of existing brands are actually exceeding customer expectations. This means that the bar is still very low for omnichannel experiences, and that companies can set themselves apart by giving customers a targeted, synchronized experience along their path-to-purchase.

As the global conversation about technology continues, an increasing number of company leaders are getting distracted by advancements in arenas such as virtual reality and in-store robots. As a result, there is more opportunity than ever for business-owners to differentiate themselves by refining their customer experience and exceeding customer expectations with real-time personalization and targeted omnichannel marketing initiatives. NectarOM makes it easy for businesses to fully integrate their back-of-house processes, so they can accurately and skillfully respond to customer behavior in real time.

Conversational Selling: Take Personalization To the Next Level

Increase customer satisfaction and conversion with conversational marketing

Live chat and messaging apps have become an integral part of any omni-channel customer service strategy.

Customers value the ability to get answers when and where they want and companies are improving customer satisfaction and conversion rate thanks to the capability of providing real-time responses.

One study found that 38% of customers said they have made a purchase due to a good live chat session. Live chat assistance has also been noted for helping to decrease cart abandonment by up to 30%, which in turn lead to an increase in sales.

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The key to getting the most out of live chat or messaging apps is to deliver a personalized experience tailored to each customer with conversational selling.

One-to-one conversations: the most effective way to convert

Remember the good ol’ days, before lead generation forms and email marketing, when people made sales solely by talking to other people!

With the help of advanced marketing technologies, it’s now possible to have one-on-one conversations with a large number of prospects and customers simultaneously and deliver a highly personalized experience in a way that’s most convenient.

This is often called “conversational marketing” – a process of having real-time, one-on-one conversations to capture, qualify, and connect with your best leads anytime and anywhere.

How to optimize conversational marketing

At the heart of conversational selling is a customer-driven approach that focuses on one-on-one interactions.

With the aid of technology, marketers can scale up these personalized interactions such that one employee can manage multiple, concurrent one-to-one conversations.

Here are some characteristics of conversational marketing to leverage:

Real-time interactions and fast responses

Conversational marketing is effective because customers can get the assistance they need right away.

With the combination of chatbot and live agents, you can effectively provide customers with the most relevant information as quickly as possible.

Chatbots can be programmed to respond to specific questions while triaging more complex requests so that a live agent can step in to assist promptly.

Customer-centric engagements

You don’t convert customers only by collecting leads. You make sales when you engage prospects in a dialog to understand what they need and offer a solution.

Conversational selling is effective because it focuses on having a two-way conversation so that you can deliver the most relevant information or solution based on the context of the interactions.

Personalized conversations

These one-to-one conversations are contextual and informed by a customer’s past interactions with your brand.

Even if you’re talking to a lead for the first time, you can add a personal touch by getting insights from their browsing history, the page on which they’re initiating the contact, or their locations based on IP addresses.

Customer insights

You can glean customer insights and collect additional information to enrich existing customer profiles through conversational marketing.

For example, when you ask a customer if he wants to be notified when there’s news about a certain product category, you get information on the kind of items they’re interested in to inform your segmentation and marketing efforts.

The information gathered through these conversations can help you get a more in-depth understanding of your customers so that you can fine-tune your sales and marketing strategies.

The key to seamless customer experience

Conversational marketing helps deliver seamless customer experience and facilitates prospects’ progression down the purchasing path.

A 360-degree customer profile is the key to success for this marketing strategy.

This single customer view allows your team to deliver an outstanding purchasing experience based on all the interactions a customer has had with your brand so you can maximize the use of technologies such as chat and messaging apps to optimize your ROI.

Using Analytics to Choose Inventory for a New Season

Making purchasing decisions for a store or retail business is a complicated proposition. The decision-making becomes especially complex when you are trying to determine which products deserve permanent shelf space on your store floor; and which need to be discounted or sent back to the warehouse to make room for new inventory. It can also be difficult to know the answer to sourcing questions such as when to respond to trends, how much to purchase of a specific item and what price-points to sell at for maximum profitability. As a result, an increasing number of retailers are relying on predictive analytics to make more informed purchasing decisions. In fact, according to Martech Advisor, 57 percent of B2B marketers said predictive analytics was their “primary tool” for 2017.

Consider the following to learn more about how predictive analytics are helping companies to maximize sales and to make the most of their inventory budgets.

Determine Top-Performing Categories

Before a retailer can begin using predictive analytics to make better purchasing decisions, they have to determine the top-performing categories in their existing inventory. These can be found by collecting data on factors such including: sales numbers their POS system, consumer engagement with product images in specific categories and high-traffic areas on the company’s website. From here, a retailer can determine which categories are the most profitable, as well as what categories could be expanded to increase future sales.

Forecast Future Seasonal Inventory

Once a retailer knows where to expand their existing inventory, it is time to measure seasonal sales from past years against current industry trends to forecast seasonal sales. This helps determine how large of an order to place for a specific item, as well as where to take a well-calculated risk with a new trend or category. Targeted purchasing recommendations can be derived from this information, so retailers can order only what they need, when they need it – thus boosting seasonal sales and reducing the risk of end-of-the-season discounting.

Adjust Strategy Where Necessary  

The capabilities of predictive analytics don’t stop once a retailer rolls out their new inventory. Analytics-based software monitors and reports on sales performance, so retailers can keep track of which seasonal inventory categories are the most successful and make modifications to their orders whenever necessary. This means that only the best-selling merchandise gets a place on the show floor. Since NectarOM uses the “Test and Learn” method, we are able to quickly respond to sales activity, so that clients can adapt their purchasing strategy in order to augment ROI.

Keeping Abreast of Trends

It is essential for retailers to utilize predictive analytics when making seasonal purchasing decisions to remain competitive. In fact, Martech Advisor reports that 82 percent of B2B companies used predictive analytics in last year – and of the companies who did not, 67 percent intend to implement predictive analytics in 2018. It is not only important for retailers to have access to the consumer data, but also to have data-based forecasting software which enables them to quickly respond to industry trends and customer behavior. At NectarOM, we provide clients with software with real-time reporting capabilities that clearly outline actionable recommendations – so they can amplify seasonal sales and adjust to changing consumer preferences.

How To Boost ROI With Data-Driven Marketing

Are you ready to harness the power of big data in your marketing?

“Big Data” is everywhere and corporations are taking advantage of it to improve different aspects of their businesses and operations.

This includes extracting insights from a large amount of consumer data to drive marketing initiatives in the relatively new discipline of “data-driven marketing,” which is becoming increasingly popular among businesses because of its effectiveness.

What’s data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketers extract marketing insights to analyze customer data and make decisions. They use consumer information to target media purchases and refine creative messaging which can further optimize the effects of their campaigns.

Such practice is made possible by the increasing the quality and quantity of the marketing data available through a variety of digital touch points and marketing channels and the personalization, distribution, and automation technologies that can help lower cost and increase efficiency.

The use of consumer data helps marketers deliver the right message to the right audience at the right stage of their buyer’s journey through the right channel to maximize the ROI of their marketing budget.

The collection of data from these marketing campaigns also allows marketers to understand what works and what doesn’t – creating a virtuous cycle so they can further refine their strategies to optimize results.

The benefits of data-driven marketing

The initial effort of collecting data and setting up the technologies can seem daunting if you’re new to data-driven marketing.

However, once the systems are set up, you will be able to reap the myriad advantages of data-driven marketing in no time:

1. Deliver the relevant marketing message

If you’re delivering irrelevant marketing messages to your customers, you could be doing more harm than good. 74% of online consumers get frustrated with websites when the content doesn’t reflect their interests.

In addition, email campaigns with personalized content tailored to the recipients’ preferences and habits result in 6 times higher transaction rate, 29% higher unique open rates, and 41% higher unique click rates.

Being relevant is the key to standing out in today’s cluttered market because it allows you to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time to maximize engagement and conversion.

2. Monitor campaign performance

John Wanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

With data-driven marketing, this quote will become a thing of the past.

Technologies that make data-driven marketing feasible also allow you to collect detailed metrics on the performance of your campaigns and measure them against key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure that your marketing strategies are meeting your business objectives.

Data-driven marketers can track their marketing dollars along the customer journey “all the way to the bank.” This information can help them quantify the effectiveness of their strategies and get leadership support for their initiatives.

3. Optimize marketing strategy

By collecting real-time data from multiple customer touch points, marketers can easily point out what works and what doesn’t and make adjustments to respond quickly to the audience reaction and sentiment.

Data analysis allows marketers to fine-tune their messaging, distribution channels, or offers while a campaign is in progress to optimize results.

The foundation of data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing strategies are only as good as your ability to collect and utilize your customer data.

A robust customer data management platform (DMP) allows you to gather customer information from a variety of touch points and manage all the data in one centralized location.

From there, you can create highly targeted marketing campaigns based on each individual customers’ preferences and collect the necessary data to further hone your strategies.

Single Customer View Increases Effectiveness of Omnichannel Marketing

Imagine your customer got an email from your company with a coupon code for your online store. She decided to head over to the retail location a few miles away so she could get the product on the spot.

Unfortunately, when she arrived at the store, she was informed that the in-store system doesn’t have her information and she wasn’t able to redeem her discount.

Not only was she left unsatisfied with your brand but she’ll also be less likely to return to make a purchase. In addition, it’s very likely that she’d get sidetracked and never purchase the item.

This and similar scenarios aren’t uncommon these days when customers are interacting with brands via multiple touch points. They expect to move among them seamlessly – able to “pick up where they left off” on the previous channel.

For the past decade, retailers have been focusing on establishing a presence in a variety of channels, such as online, in-app, social media, phone, and in-store. However, such siloed customer experience is no longer sufficient.

Customers not only want to interact with a brand and make purchases on all channels but also have all their information accessible via all touch points so they don’t have to go back to square one when they switch channels.

Onmichannel customer experience integrates all customer interaction in one single database. This means customers can seamlessly move from channel to channel when interacting with a brand. By providing such a customer experience, you will be able to:

  • Move customers along their purchasing journey faster and increase your conversion rate
  • Nurture leads more effectively by augmenting the quality and relevance of your communications
  • Effectively provide customer support to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost
  • Cultivate customer loyalty and increase retention rate

In order to create such an experience, businesses need to switch their fundamental approach to marketing. Instead of focusing on disparate strategy for each channel, you need to turn the attention to the customer.

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Customer Centric Marketing Starts With Single Customer View

The creation of a 360° profile of a customer is the foundational element of customer-centric marketing.

This profile is created by gathering information from multiple data sources and moving it into one centralized location so it can be further analyzed and utilized.

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The use of a single customer view allows you to:

  • Turn your focus on each individual customer to create targeted messaging and offering that will increase conversion and loyalty
  • Better predict customer behaviors and be more responsive to market trends and consumer demands
  • Make better decisions in choosing new promotional channels
  • Use marketing automation more effectively

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Going back to our frustrated customer at the beginning of this article, this means she would be able to get an email about a discount and apply it to any retail channel, including online and in-store. She would be able to apply the promotion at the retail location, get the item she wants, and, in turn, be more likely to purchase from the brand again.

Single customer view has been applied by many brands successfully to boost campaign ROI and increase sales. For instance, since implementing the strategy, Speciality Fashion Group’s most recent 200 EDM campaigns have delivered an ROI of 2,200%. Clarins have used a similar strategy to identify VIP and create a sense of exclusivity that makes a selected customer feel special and valued.

Overcoming the Challenges Of Implementing Single Customer View

It’s not always easy to implement single customer view. Consolidating all customer data from multiple channels is one of the biggest challenges faced when implementing omnichannel marketing strategies.

If you have been in business for a while, you know how challenging it is to integrate fragmented customer data collected from different touch points over time to get a complete cross-channel view.

The key to overcoming such data gaps is technology integration, which will give you the ability to collect a cohesive set of data for each individual customer and make it available for further analytics and utilization.

Instead of having to cobble together data from different sources, omnichannel marketers can now bring together all customer information to create a master customer profile with tools such as NectorOM’s suite of solutions to get the most out of their customer information with functions such as data management, customer relationship management, personalization automation, omnichannel hyper-personalization.